Yeah, you currently can't "browse" the GAL due to a lack of paging/sorting controls in OpenLDAP. We are probably going to have a workaround at some point in the future, but for now you are limited to paging through searches only.

Global Address List + Calendar (NOT Displayed)

Hello,

I've seen quite a few threads on discussions about the Global Address list and hasn't seen a solution so far. I wanted to contribute a use case to this (no pun intended) and why it would be important to solve this:

Scenario:

1.) An organization is born with no LDAP, NIS, NIS+ etc.

2.) The organization has about 100 employees in a web directory
that has an export function to drop everybody into some CSV and then imported into outlook. (rudimentary way of importing, but it works)

3.) They run simple SMTP/POP3 etc.

This organization would be interested in massively porting users from their freebsd mailserver via simple /etc/passwd entries. /opt/zimbra/bin/zmprov works quite well if a filter is written to parse entries from /etc/passwd out to a file that zmprov can understand and do the import of all accounts with a generic password. This problem is easy to solve. A 1 liner shell script will fix this problem, and reformat all the users from /etc/passwd into an output that can be imported via "zmprov". However, upon importing all the entries, a user logs in and tries to schedule a meeting with someone via the calendar. They don't know everybody's email, but have no way of locating them inside the system. The user is presented with a new interface but do not know who else exists in the system. (Collaboration failed right here)

This is a problem very critical to deployment. Entries that are imported from a customer's standpoint would really want to have LDAP turned on and supported internally upon import. If the server itself can by default import a simple line like this,

ca <jdoe>@<acme>.<com> password displayName "John Doe"

the same server should be able to simply lookup any of these users without a special admin interface. A list of examples would be:

http://www.dotproject.net (they support all the features out of the box but it isn't as scalable because of a lack of refinement in some of the features that are supported) This is currently setup and working as well.

Creating users by hand and clicking through a web interface inputing entries of users everytime is extremely time consuming and would be gating factor to deployment. Since Zimbra does have LDAP support internally, why not make it become the central store for everything LDAP as well if a person's contacts are already in? Another solution for this would be to setup LDAP externally, but first export everything from /etc/passwd into the LDAP entry via some LDAP conversion script, and then configure zcs to match this.

I've seen quite a few threads on discussions about the Global Address list and hasn't seen a solution so far. I wanted to contribute a use case to this (no pun intended) and why it would be important to solve this:

If you want to see this added to zimbra then you need to file it in bugzilla as an RFE. When you add it to bugzilla don't forget to vote on it.